With all the neuroscience and writings in education, the best advice we may want to give to parents is what our own grandparents might have told us: to spend loving, quality time with our adolescents. Teenagers desperately need contact with their parents. They need to be involved in their families just at a time when they are trying to separate themselves from the family. As teachers, we know how crucial it is to guide them, influence them, and mold them. As much as they resist being molded and influenced, the fact is, they still need it…. Just as the young male Columbian mammoths used faulty judgment in advancing to unstable ground for better food, so will our adolescents increase risky behavior without parent and teacher intervention. (Philip, R., 74)

As I was walking home after school last week, I struck up a conversation with a mom who was concerned about her daughter. She claimed that my student had become a total different person after starting high school four weeks ago

and didn’t know what to do to reconnect with her again. I found out that this change was mainly due to the fact that she had gotten a cellphone as a present for her middle school graduation. According to this worried mom, my student does not want to participate in family activities anymore, locks herself in her room once she gets home from school and rejects most family interactions. At the moment, all I could tell her was that this was probably a phase and that it will be over once the novelty of the cellphone had faded away. However, if I could talk to this parent again now that I have read this passage, I would ask her to not give up on her efforts to reconnect with her daughter, that although it may be frustrating to feel rejected by one’s own child, my student needs that attention and empathy now more than ever. Technology can be a great ally to educators in and out of the classroom, but for parents like this mom; it can turn into the worst enemy. So I wonder, is it possible for educators to intervene in these kinds of situations? Could we perhaps educate our students and their parents on how to deal with technology interfering in family relationships at a time when parental involvement is crucial?